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A love of the Navy inherited from his father and a respect for engineering learned at Lafayette have inspired Carl M. Albero ’57 through two careers involving ships, missiles, and the nation’s defense.
During 21 years in the Navy, Albero rose to the rank of captain and retired as chief engineer on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, an enviable position he describes as “the Cadillac of Navy careers.”
Passing up a shot at the rank of admiral, Albero retired in 1978 to meet the demands of a growing family. After a brief career in real estate development, he founded an engineering services company with several partners in his Virginia Beach garage in 1981. That company, American Systems Engineering Corp. LLC, is now the premier engineering services company in the United States. As president and chief executive officer of AMSEC, Albero oversees a workforce of 3,200 at 20 locations across the country.
AMSEC contracts, primarily with the Navy, are expected to gross $500 million next year. AMSEC is owned jointly by Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Northrop Grumman, and Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC). Last year, five Lafayette engineering students interned at AMSEC offices in New York and Virginia Beach.
Albero’s vision was recognized last March when he received the prestigious Edward M. Greer Award at the U.S. Department of Defense Logistics Conference, Jacksonville, Fla. The National Defense Industrial Association, which has 24,000 members representing 950 companies, gave Albero the award for his outstanding contribution to the Navy in the area of life-cycle logistical support services.
After growing up in Westwood, N.J., Albero enrolled in Lafayette as a chemical engineering student in 1953. He played fullback and catcher, and waited tables to help pay tuition. After a difficult first year, he almost gave up chemical engineering but was talked out of it by his mother and Bernard Markline, his chemistry professor.
In his senior year, Albero made the dean’s list. A product of Lafayette’s Navy ROTC, Albero was commissioned as ensign upon graduation. His father, Michael Albero, now 89, retired from the Navy as a master chief.
The quality of his Lafayette education was driven home at the Navy’s postgraduate school, where Albero had a leg up on other students in heat transfer and thermodynamics. He finished first in his postgraduate class in 1965, and earned an M.B.A. at George Washington University in 1971.
Albero went without a paycheck for six months and took a second mortgage on his house to get AMSEC off the ground in 1981. The partners scraped together $135,000, and the new company got a $200,000 line of credit. Five years later, when Time magazine gave AMSEC its Small Business of the Year Award, the company was pulling in $19 million in contracts from both naval and commercial clients.
“They’re an unusual case,” the article said. “Few small business launches can claim the growth AMSEC has enjoyed in its first few years. Clearly they are doing something right.”
In 1987, AMSEC was bought by SAIC, a $700 million company known for its work in information technology and systems integration. In 1999, SAIC sold 45 percent to Newport News Shipbuilding and formed AMSEC LLC.
“The constants are that we are still employee owned,” Albero says, “and I am still president and CEO.” AMSEC provides naval architecture and marine engineering, as well as combat and electronic systems engineering. It does naval ship systems assessments, maintenance engineering, and program development. Able to service aircraft carriers from launch to retirement, AMSEC has 200 engineers aboard the John F. Kennedy in dry dock. They design and service weapons elevators that hoist bombs seven stories to the deck of the carrier, as well as train operators of the weapons elevators.
“The company has placed a premium on continually expanding and improving support to customers who operate, maintain, and modernize ships,” Albero says. “AMSEC year-to-year revenue growth rate has been over 60 percent due to new contract wins and strategic acquisitions.”
When he’s not at his desk, Albero, an unabashed New York Yankees fan, tends one of the largest vintage baseball card collections in the country. He has 500,000 cards, including a set spanning the entire career of Yankees’ slugger Mickey Mantle, issued between 1953 through 1965.
Albero’s business interests include Page House Inn, a bed and breakfast, near Norfolk. Through AMSEC, he is an avid supporter of the United Way and is a benefactor to Kings Daughters Hospital for Children in Norfolk.
Albero recently endowed Lafayette with a charitable trust in the name of his mother, Lucille Albero, who died of Alzheimer’s disease. The trust supports first-year engineering students. “I have a soft spot for Lafayette, particularly for kids who grew up without a silver spoon,” he says. “I remember how hard I had to work.”